Don't stop smiling, just be you
When I was a teenager, I spent loads of time leafing through fashion magazines, and I was one of those kids who'd tear pages out of them and stick them on my bedroom walls or glue them onto blank [or boring] pages of my schoolbooks. Later when I studied photography, I did a lot of portfolio work with aspiring models, trying to recreate what I saw in my favourite editorials. Then when I started actually working in photography, I sought out jobs in fashion as my priority. But when I later started Elska Magazine, it took some time to realise that some of the rules and habits of fashion were not compatible with Elska's goals.
Part of it is about expression. I knew that I wanted the men in Elska to be natural and to reveal their own personalities, but I was stuck in this habit of either trying to keep them as neutral as possible or selecting the most neutral images for publication. In fashion, a model can draw you in to the scene but then your focus should go to what they're wearing. That's why they usually don't express much, why you don't see smiling a lot, and why they tend not to engage too much by looking into the camera (and at you the reader). It may sound obvious that for the portraits I wanted in Elska I should encourage them to be themselves and let them engage with our eyes, but I was stuck in this notion that it just looked cooler for them to appear aloof.
In the first few issues of Elska (Lviv, Berlin, Reykjavík), you can detect a bit less personality and engagement from the subjects, particularly if you have the original pressings of these issues (we later re-issued them, swapping many of the pics with more expressive ones). But even three years later when we were making our latest issue, Elska Seoul, I remember shooting Jay S and getting frustrated with his exceptionally upbeat mood. I actually said to him, "Stop smiling." When I saw his confused reaction, I explained that readers might think he was faking it, as if I'd told him to "say cheese", but then I realised that it was my problem. Of course he wasn't faking it, this was him being real. Jay is just a very smiley guy.
Clothes are another area where my early fashion influences conflicted with Elska. While I do believe that style can reveal culture, setting, and time — which are important for Elska and why Elska follows a somewhat blatant editorial format of presenting each subject in a variety of looks — it is necessary that the clothes are the subjects' own. I made the mistake to style one of the guys just once though. It was in the first issue (Elska Lviv) with Oleg B, who we gave various blue and yellow clothes from American Apparel to, as an attempt to recall the colours of the Ukrainian flag. Even during the shoot it felt wrong though. I hate to use this now-hackneyed word, but it just wasn't authentic.
I still enjoy fashion, especially something unusual or avant garde, and I'm unashamedly maximalist, but I can let the fashion magazines deal with that. I also think a pouty, pseudo-angry look is pretty hot, but I'm not going to try to piss guys off just for my voyeuristic pleasure. For Elska, it has to be real because ultimately our goal is to let readers feel like they've travelling with us to each city and getting to know these guys . We're not here to sell their clothes, we're here to make you want to travel, meet people and widen your world.
Liam Campbell is editor + chief photographer of Elska Magazine. He still likes leafing through fashion magazines when he can afford to buy them. Donations appreciated.
